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The voice of The Sky Valley since 1899Tue, 31 Mar 2015 19:52:00 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.3Art in Action: Local artist turns Seahawks’ headshttp://www.monroemonitor.com/2014/12/16/art-action-local-artist-turns-seahawks-heads/
http://www.monroemonitor.com/2014/12/16/art-action-local-artist-turns-seahawks-heads/#commentsTue, 16 Dec 2014 19:10:11 +0000http://www.monroemonitor.com/?p=12101When local artist Rowan Carey decided he wanted to challenge himself as an artist, it was kind of on a whim. He simply wanted to see what he could accomplish in a few hours’ time. So the 27-year-old Seahawks fan decided to tackle Richard Sherman. On the canvas, that is. Carey was so inspired by [...]

When Rowan Carey posted his completed painting of Seahawk Richard Sherman on Facebook, it didn’t take long for Sherman to respond, inviting him to the team’s training facility. “I just kind of dropped everything and went down to their practice facility and met him,” said Carey. Photo courtesy of Rowan Carey

When local artist Rowan Carey decided he wanted to challenge himself as an artist, it was kind of on a whim. He simply wanted to see what he could accomplish in a few hours’ time.

So the 27-year-old Seahawks fan decided to tackle Richard Sherman.

On the canvas, that is.

Carey was so inspired by one of Richard Sherman’s Thanksgiving Day game interceptions, he knew he wanted to commemorate the image.

“I wanted to do a painting of Richard Sherman, and I wanted to paint a play that was recent in people’s memories,” said Carey. “Since I figured a lot of people were watching that game, what better than to paint one of Sherman’s interceptions!”

He started the painting on Sunday, Nov. 30, highlighting his progress on his “Artwork by Rowan Carey” Facebook page. He completed it that night, and on Monday, Dec. 1, he posted an image of the 11 x 14-inch oil painting on his Twitter page, tagging Richard Sherman in the post.

Within about three minutes he had a reply, and within a few hours, he was at the Seahawks training facility shaking hands with the dynamic cornerback himself.

“I just kind of dropped everything and went down to their practice facility and met him,” said Carey. “It was still wet to the touch when I gave it to him.”

He brought another in-progress Richard Sherman painting with him that will eventually depict the famous championship game tip, an end-zone tip by Sherman into the hands of teammate Malcolm Smith which sealed the Seahawks’ win over San Francisco in January. The painting, an 18 x 24-inch oil painting that he started during the summer, now features Sherman’s signature in the upper right hand corner.

“That was pretty cool,” said Carey. “Definitely the highlight of my art career so far.”

Carey, who lives in Monroe with his wife, Staci, and their 2 ½ month old son, Wyatt, graduated from Monroe High School in 2005. While he’s been artistically inclined all his life, it’s only been recently that he’s started to accumulate some awards for his work. He won first place in one of the adult categories at the Evergreen State Fair in 2012, and in both 2013 and 2014 he took best in show.

At first glance, the detail in this painting of Seahawk Quarterback Russell Wilson makes it hard to see that it is not a photograph. The painting took Best in Show at the Evergreen State Fair for 2014. Photo courtesy of Rowan Carey

This year’s winning painting? An oil painting of Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson entitled “#notimetosleep.” Carey started the Wilson painting in December of 2013, but with his full-time job, didn’t have time to complete it. He finished it in June, just in time for the fair.

All told, the award-winning piece took him somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 hours to complete.

Extremely versatile as a painter, Carey paints cars, stills, landscapes and of course, the Seahawks. His 2013 best in show piece featured a series of liquor bottles entitled “Jack and Friends,” which he painted in acrylics. He enjoys using ink markers, acrylics and oils, depending on what he’s trying to accomplish.

“With people and textures and all that kind of stuff the oils are, I think, a little easier because you can work them a little more, and blend them a little easier,” said Carey. “Stuff with real sharp lines and all that, I use acrylics.”

He plans to continue painting sports-themed pieces, and would like to incorporate both the Mariners and the Sonics into his portfolio. He also enjoys painting cars; both stills and action shots featuring racecars. The love for painting cars comes from a childhood and adolescence spent racing them, often at Evergreen Speedway in Monroe.

“My brother and I have raced all kinds of stuff so that’s kind of where the interest in cars comes from, and I’ve always really been into old muscle cars and stuff,” said Carey. “I have a ‘69 Camaro that’s kind of my toy, so that’s where the inspiration comes from there.”

He was recently commissioned to paint a picture of NASCAR driver Ty Dillon’s first truck series win, which took place in 2012. For that piece, Carey used both oil and acrylic paints to achieve the realistically energetic look that he wanted. The painting depicts the intensity of the squealing tires and billowing smoke, effectively capturing the spirit of the racetrack.

This depiction of a bevy of beverages earned Carey a “Best in Show” award at the 2013 Evergreen State Fair. Photo courtesy of Rowan Carey

He explained that he used the oil paint to capture the organic look of the smoke, and acrylic paint to capture the crisp lines of the truck.

“Doing cars and trucks, and stuff that has really crisp lines, I’ll usually use acrylics because it dries faster and you can kind of go over stuff a little quicker,” said Carey. “Even on a painting where I’m doing oil, a lot of times I’ll do an acrylic background, just to kind of knock out the color that I want the background. You can do oils on top of acrylics, but you don’t really want to do acrylics on top of oils.”

Since Dillon is Carey’s soon to be brother-in-law, he hopes to do more NASCAR paintings in the future.

Carey sells his originals along with prints on his Etsy site. He does custom work, and is hoping that someone will eventually commission him to do a mural. He’s painted a large-scale Seahawks logo in somebody’s home, and hopes to be able to do additional even larger-scale pieces in the future.

To check out Carey’s work, please visit his Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/Rowancareyart. His Etsy page can be found here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RowanCarey.

]]>http://www.monroemonitor.com/2014/12/16/art-action-local-artist-turns-seahawks-heads/feed/4Monroe’s Jessica Irwin talks about life as a Sea Galhttp://www.monroemonitor.com/2014/02/18/monroes-jessica-irwin-talks-life-sea-gal/
http://www.monroemonitor.com/2014/02/18/monroes-jessica-irwin-talks-life-sea-gal/#commentsTue, 18 Feb 2014 19:35:55 +0000http://www.monroemonitor.com/?p=7403By Polly Keary, Editor When Jessica Irwin first tried out to be a cheerleader, she did it as a gag. She wasn’t the cheerleader type, she said. She was more the mosh-pit type, wearing the fan shirts of her favorite bands to school, and she considered herself a nerd. But not only did the Monroe [...]

Jessica Irwin’s brief dance on the sidelines with Richard Sherman following Sherman’s interception at the start of the season went viral, and landed Irwin a spot on a local radio show, on which she is now a regular guest.Photo courtesy of Jessica Irwin

By Polly Keary, Editor

When Jessica Irwin first tried out to be a cheerleader, she did it as a gag.

She wasn’t the cheerleader type, she said. She was more the mosh-pit type, wearing the fan shirts of her favorite bands to school, and she considered herself a nerd.

But not only did the Monroe girl make the team, she cheered her way to a position with the Sea Gals. Two weeks ago she cheered at the Super Bowl, then rode in the victory parade that drew 700,000 to downtown Seattle.

It’s been a wild ride, but for the next few weeks she’s taking some time off at home in Monroe. Friday, Irwin took an hour to sit down and talk about all the last few years have brought.

Jessica Irwin of Monroe has been a Sea Gal for four years, and is now a team captain. She started out learning to dance at the age of 6 at Sky Valley Dance, and was a Bearcat cheerleader.Photo courtesy of Jessica Irwin

Becoming a Sea Gal

When Irwin tried out for the Bearcats cheer team as a high school student, she did have one advantage. Despite the fact that her musical tastes ran to hard rock, she had been studying at Sky Valley Dance since she was six.

“My mom just knew,” said Irwin, a friendly and articulate young woman who still seemed a little overwhelmed by all that has happened this football season.

By the time she was 15, she was a dance instructor.

And while she hadn’t taken cheer seriously at first, after doing it for a while, she realized she not only was good at it, she really liked it.

After graduating in 2008, Irwin went to the prestigious Cornish School of the Arts, where she studied dance and art.

Then, in 2010, she tried out for the Sea Gals.

The Sea Gals are believed to be one of the most intensely-trained squads in the NFL, and the audition process to get in certainly suggests it might be true.

“It’s a two-week process,” said Irwin. “It starts with preliminaries, and you turn on whatever music and dance freestyle.”

Of about 250 women, about half are invited to the semi-finals, where they are taught the steps to a dance.

“You come in the next day with it perfected,” she said. “You do it again, and they make the final cut.”

All that week, finalists are interviewed, and then the Friday before the finals, the cheerleaders are taught another dance, plus a kick-line routine, and expected to perfect them, as well as be ready to perform a solo.

“When you go to finals, there are 60 people left, and two at a time, you go up in front of the big lights and you answer a question and do your dance,” said Irwin.

Of the finalists, 33 are selected for the team. Irwin was one of them.

That was in April of 2010. When she learned she’d made the squad, Irwin’s life took a dramatic turn.

Being a Sea Gal

Football season is only four months long; five if the team makes the postseason, but Sea Gals, Irwin learned, train nearly all year long.

“We make the team in April, and then train and train and train,” said Irwin. “We only have two months off.”

Sea Gals only perform at home games, of which there are 10 in the regular season and as many as 13 if the team goes to the playoffs.

But there’s a lot more to being a Sea Gal than performing at games.

Some Sea Gals appear in parades, perform for the military at home and overseas, and participate in NFL cheer events.

They wind up doing radio and television appearances too.

It doesn’t pay a lot, said Irwin, but it comes with some great perks.

“We have sponsorships for hair and nails and tanning,” she said. “And we get season tickets.”

And even though there are rules preventing Sea Gals from fraternizing with Seahawks, they do get to meet the players once in a while.

“I got to go to Vancouver with Richard Sherman, Red Bryant and Doug Baldwin,” Irwin said. “They are just really great guys.”

She allowed that some of the players aren’t always quite as concerned about the anti-fraternization rules as are the cheerleaders.

“Sometimes we have to say, ‘Hey, I really like my job,’” she said with a smile.

It is a very fun job, she went on. But when the Seahawks made it to the Super Bowl, things got very exciting very fast.

Super Bowl

Irwin was made a team captain last year, one of four cheerleaders to oversee a squad. To get ready for the Super Bowl, she had to learn dances to 30 songs in order to be able to teach them to her squad.

“We were given our music on a Tuesday, and we were leaving that Thursday morning,” said Irwin.

They flew out to New Jersey in a chartered plane, and got up at 4:30 a.m., (1:30 in their own time zone) to make the rounds of talk shows.

Irwin and her team mates appeared on Good Morning America, the Today Show, and Fox and Friends.

Then they headed to the stadium and practiced, where temperatures were very low.

Then it was back to the talk shows, and Irwin was among those who got to go on The Crowd Goes Wild with Regis Philbin.

The following morning they practiced again, then they had few hours off. Irwin also appeared on Fox Sports News.

When the big day arrived, she had a moment in which she was overwhelmed by it all.

“At the Super Bowl I was leading out of our tunnel, and I had a few minutes to look up at the stadium and I’m seeing orange everywhere, and a sea of blue. It was incredibly nerve wracking,” she said. “It was such a big moment. I was realizing, ‘Oh my God, I’m at the Super Bowl.’ And I was trembling on the field. I just couldn’t believe I was there.”

The parade

After the Super Bowl, Irwin rode for three hours through a crowd of 700,000 as Marshawn Lynch danced and threw Skittles on the hood of the vehicle. It was a great day, said Irwin.Photo by Steve and Robin Martin

Three days later, the largest crowd ever to convene in Seattle was converging on the downtown, and Irwin and the Sea Gals were riding in the parade that three-quarters of a million people had come to see.

Irwin was riding in one of the Ducks, a fleet of amphibious vehicles that ferry tourists around the city.

On the hood was Marshawn Lynch.

“He was throwing Skittles, and he was drinking Fireball and banging on a drum,” said Jessica, smiling at the memory. “I couldn’t stop staring at all the people. We were getting pelted with frozen Skittles. It hurt, but it was so cool. It turned into a thing, the Skittles. We threw them too.”

It took three hours to get through the parade, and even though it was freezing cold and she couldn’t feel her feet, she loved every minute of it, she said.

After the season

Jessica will get a few weeks to collect her breath before she has to try out for the team again (all team members have to try out every year, but the Sea Gals already on the team get to start in the finals).

And although there are three women on the team who are 37, meaning Jessica could theoretically be a Sea Gal for another 14 seasons, she said she has other things in mind.

One thing that interests her is radio, and that’s because of an unexpected incident at the start of the season this year.

In the opening game of the season, Richard Sherman made a spectacular interception, then ran it back up the field before barreling off into the sidelines. (See video here)

Gleeful, he started dancing with a cheerleader, and video of it went viral. The cheerleader was Irwin.

“I thought it was a funny moment, but it ended up going viral,” she said. “It was on the NFL network, and a few of the local radio stations had me on to laugh and talk about the experience, even though it was three seconds.”

One of the stations, KISS 106.1 FM, liked her and invited her back. Now she is semi-regular on the Jackie and Bender morning show, where on her first day she was tasked with snapping mousetraps onto the fingers of a movie critic as he tried to deliver a movie review. (See video here)

And on Valentine’s Day, she served as a bridesmaid while the hosts married people on the air.

She also chats about celebrity gossip and other pop culture stuff on the show.

She hopes one day to have a career in something similar, she said.

“I’m really hoping this radio thing has a future,” she said. “I would love to get into TV. I’m really into sports. I’d love to be a sports commentator, especially after this year. I can keep up the stats with any guy, I feel like. I’m pursuing every avenue.”

She’d also like to go back to college and finish her degree, she said. And she would like to keep dancing and doing choreography, perhaps own a studio one day.

And she grinned at the thought of her 10-year high school reunion in a few years.

“I’m, like, the nerd that made it,” she said. “The total dork that was wearing fan t-shirts and sweats. I think that would be really funny.”